


It's Something About Mirrors

by thehousewedestroyed



Series: The Real Relationship Was The House We Destroyed Along The Way [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Extended Metaphors, Horcruxes, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 09:38:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15385962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehousewedestroyed/pseuds/thehousewedestroyed
Summary: Or else it might be about forgiveness.





	It's Something About Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> Set some years after both [More Than A Firebolt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10642545?view_full_work=true) and [Werewolf Discourse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12614376?view_full_work=true).

There’s something about mirrors, Sirius decides one foggy Tuesday morning. He’s not quite sure _what_ it is about mirrors, but there’s definitely a thing about them. He is standing in front of one, shaving, because it is morning and he has just gotten out of the bath and he feels like shaving. Harry’s going to be a bit peeved. He appreciates the salt and pepper beard Sirius has been growing, but it has been getting itchy, and it’ll grow back soon enough anyway. Things change. Beards come and go. Grey hairs stay forever, apparently.

So he is standing in front of the mirror, sink full of warm, sudsy water, razor in hand. And he sees in his reflection — past his reflection, through the doorway behind his back — a flash of pale hair. He realises his second cousin is in the house. 

Sirius isn’t too fond of Draco Malfoy. Why would he be? The kid — okay, not a kid anymore, a thirty-two year old man, just like Harry. He never thinks of Harry as a kid, because that would be uncomfortable. But Malfoy, maybe it’s just because of his slightly nasal voice, or that he’s technically family, or just the fact that he sucks, but the word has caught in his head and one day Malfoy will probably be seventy years old and still a kid in Sirius’s eyes. The point is, the kid has little going for him, likeability-wise. He’s leaps and bounds ahead of where he once was, admittedly, but in some respects he hasn’t budged an inch. He’s still smug and squeamish and snide, and Sirius has no reason to like him. Not that he has a dog in this fight. 

But there’s something about mirrors. In school, hiding a mirror under his desk and peeking down to see James’ face looking up at him, making blowjob jokes, and trying not to laugh too loudly in Runes class. In Azkaban, staring out through the thin crack of a window in his cell at the still surface of the North Sea, like obsidian under the stars, seeing the moon rise only in its reflection. Thinking of Remus and changing to be with him under one moon because he said he would, every time. A mirror again — the same one, by his bedside — and hearing Harry’s voice in it late in the evening, night after night. Harry at fifteen was sharp and furious, but here through the mirror he could let his guard fall just a little bit, close the drapes around his bed, cast a spell for privacy, and talk to Sirius for hours. A panicked shouting of his name through the same mirror, answered — and Sirius hates to think what would have happened if _that_ had gone differently. 

Maybe mirrors are windows, not for seeing yourself, but for seeing others. So like, regular windows. 

Harry told him once about this other mirror, the one where he saw his family. He told Sirius how he had seen the faces of his own grandparents, and he described Fleamont and Euphemia to Sirius in such vivid detail that Sirius had realised he had almost forgotten what they looked like, these two people who were better parents to him than his own ever were. That mirror had sounded wonderful, and he wondered what he would have seen, but Harry said it was dangerous. 

‘Was it evil, you reckon?’ Sirius had asked, and Harry had just shook his head, a little unsettled. 

‘Nothing like that,’ he replied. ‘Are people evil? The mirror was only a reflection of them, wasn’t it?’ 

‘What, like a regular mirror?’ 

Harry snorted, and the conversation dropped — but Harry’s words stuck with Sirius. 

_Are people evil?_

Of course some people are evil. That Harry, out of everyone, would consider otherwise is insane. Harry has seen evil, much more than he ever should have, and someone who knows darkness with the sort of intimacy that Harry does should be harder to it, Sirius thinks. Like flint. Constant vigilance, and so on. But instead Harry says things sometimes like ‘Are people evil?’ and lets Draco Malfoy into their house at nine in the bloody morning.

After he has finished shaving, Sirius washes off his face, dresses, and heads down to the drawing room where he finds Harry, alone, eating a croissant. There is a whole bag of croissants. Sirius helps himself to one, and says, ‘What was Malfoy doing here?’ 

‘Merlin knows,’ Harry answers around a bite of pastry. ‘He got a new broom and wanted to show it off.’ 

‘What broom?’ 

‘The new Nimbus. It’s very nice, but I think he was mostly just checking I didn’t already have it so that he could properly gloat. He did leave these behind, though, they’re from Nico’s café.’ 

‘I’ll get you a better broom,’ Sirius promises, immediately, and Harry rolls his eyes — but warmth flushes his face and he grins stupidly. 

‘Please grow back the beard.’ 

‘Maybe.’ Sirius gives Harry a shrewd look and asks, ‘What’s with this thing where you’re friends with him, anyway?’ 

He doesn’t get this _thing_ at all, where people have just welcomed Malfoy into their lives. Remus is the worst of them all, but the _Ways of Remus Lupin_ have always been somewhat mysterious, even as he is the moon to Sirius’s star and they orbit each other through life like celestial bodies do. He has his reasons, Sirius understands, for feeling a kinship to Malfoy, and that’s just werewolf stuff and he has to take it as a given. But Harry is different. Harry isn’t a werewolf, Harry is just a man who has loathed Malfoy since he was eleven and is now happily eating his croissants. 

But Harry just says, ‘Er, we’re not really friends.’ 

‘But you’re _friendly_.’ 

‘Guess so. Why not? He’s alright.’ 

‘He’s a tosser!’ 

‘I know that.’ Harry tears off another piece of light, fluffy pastry between his fingers. ‘People change. Malfoy is a git, yeah, but there’s something else to him too. I think he’s been strong, don’t you? Standing up to his parents, marrying a muggle, doing all this werewolf stuff.’ 

‘Ehhh.’ Sirius wobbles his hand noncommittally. ‘Sure.’

‘It’s like your brother, a bit. When it mattered, he came through.’

‘Okay, two things. One: my brother was an insufferable idiot, and if he was alive today he wouldn’t be breezing into our house whenever he felt like it. I’m not sure he’d even be getting a Christmas card. Two: Malfoy didn’t come through when it mattered, he came through arguably about a decade after it mattered, if at all.’ 

Harry blinks at him. ‘You wouldn’t send Regulus a Christmas card?’ 

‘Like fuck I would,’ Sirius says. Then, at Harry’s bewildered expression, he grabs another croissant from the bag, shoves it in his mouth and says, muffled, ‘Oh, of course, you’re the one who sends your cousin cards twice a year, for some unknown reason.’ 

That’s the thing: Harry _does_. He sends Dudley Dursley cards at his birthday and at Christmas, every year, and speaks to him on the phone about every sixth Sunday, for what seems like a patently difficult half hour. Sirius has given up on trying to understand why, but Harry just does things like that, sometimes. 

One time, they bought a couple of fish (which live in the study now, swimming in a little aquarium built into the bookshelf) and when they were naming them, Harry had said, ‘Let’s call this one Severus.’ 

Sirius had barked out a laugh and said, ‘Ha! Yeah, because it’s slimy.’ 

No, Harry had replied, offended. Because it would be a nice way to remember him. 

‘Remember Snivellus?! Why in the world would we want to remember _him_? I make a conscious effort every day to forget that slimeball ever existed.’ 

‘He was one of the bravest—’ Harry started, and Sirius took his face in his hands and pronounced, seriously:

‘Harry James Potter, I love you more than anything in the world and it would kill me to lose you, but if you finish that sentence, I’m going to turn _you_ into a fish.’ 

‘I just mean—’ 

Sirius put his finger over Harry’s lips and said, ‘Shh. Listen to me. Doing some marginally alright deeds because you’re fixated and randy for a woman who had no interest in you in her lifetime? Does not make you a hero.’

‘He loved my mum. Like you loved my dad.’ 

‘That’s not love, sweet thing. Love isn’t one sided, love is building something together. I’ll speak to this with authority, because I thought what I felt for your dad was love, and it was close, but it was three people working off slightly different blueprints and we kept building the rooms in the wrong places. Okay? That was infatuation, it was a fumbling attempt at love, but the foundation wasn’t there. This is love. Whatever Snivellus felt? It was all inside only him, and it was expressed _miserably_.’ 

‘I still think he acted bravely,’ Harry said. ‘But alright, we can name the fish something else.’ 

There are some things that they don’t talk about often, like the time Snape locked Sirius inside a suitcase for the better part of a year and insisted, somehow, that this was justified for the greater good. Sirius knows Harry finds it appalling, but he also knows that Harry understands why Snape did it, and that is something he doesn’t understand about Harry at all. 

They named the fish Asparagus, because it was green. 

Harry claims that he changed after the horcrux. Sirius doesn’t really see it, at least no more than anyone changes in their late teens and early twenties. He became calm, but even James calmed down after school ended. But Harry says its more than that, and he says it's like some parts of him which he always thought were _him_ were actually Voldemort, all along. 

‘You’d think it would be like, a mirror image. All the bad things in the reflection, Voldemort. All the good things in me, the real me. But it’s not like that at all. Some of the things that I think were actually Voldemort weren’t bad at all. Like, my feelings for Ginny, if that makes sense? I think that was Tom Riddle, somehow. But it wasn’t bad. And there was a… drive, that I felt, that I don’t these days. It was a drive to prove or to live up to something. But instead it’s just acceptance. Even other things, like seeing his mother in the Pensieve, I felt a sympathy for her that I think was a mourning. I don’t know, I might be giving him too much credit on that one. That might just be me.’ 

Sirius can’t comprehend it. If Harry is still willing to look past all the bad in some people to find that tiny, tiny flame of _something_ redeemable, maybe it’s not sympathy so much as empathy, and maybe that’s a little bit of horcrux left inside him even now. It’s a disturbing thought. Sirius prefers things to be straightforward. Voldemort was the worst of the worst. Snape was a shitstain. Regulus was a death-eater. You don’t just forget these things. You don’t choose to only remember the good. 

But it’s something about mirrors. Sirius thinks about his second cousin, who is named for the stars, who walks a tightrope of estrangement from his family, who went against what was expected of him. Who turns into a dog, and who is as gay as the day is long. 

Harry looks through this glass and it’s a connection, a window. Forgiveness comes to him too well, bridging a gap that Sirius doesn’t see anything good in crossing. 

The funny thing with mirrors is that they never let you see your own features. The reflection that they show, wreathed in silver, is always the inverse of reality and Sirius has to remind himself of this. Because it’s tempting to wonder if he’s actually looking at himself when he sees this unfamiliar face. Grey eyes. Decades lost to isolation. Sirius looks into the mirror and sees everything that could be wrong. His own face is unfamiliar sometimes, stopping him in his tracks as he takes stock of who he is. 

It’s dangerous, he thinks, to stare too long into this mirror. Harry can do it, perhaps — but maybe that is because there’s something dangerous about Harry.


End file.
